RAID partner for my iMac

[WinstonRumfoord]

Looking for a more robust RAID system to go with my office iMac.

Used for HD video editing and storage, as well as RAW photo editing and storage.

I am planning on the akitio Thunder2 with 4 x WD Black 2TBs.

- About how much performance would I lose in terms of r/w by going with a raid 10 or 5 vs a raid 0? I will be doing automated nightly CCC clones, backups are covered.

- I also have another thunderbolt 2 bay enclosure, if I jam 2 4tb drives in there can I create a raid 10 from pairing that with my Raid 0 new box? Will the performance be impacted on account of the stripes being connected via thunderbolt, if even possible?

Thanks!

 

[matreya]

Looking for a more robust RAID system to go with my office iMac.

Used for HD video editing and storage, as well as RAW photo editing and storage.

I am planning on the akitio Thunder2 with 4 x WD Black 2TBs.

Unless you already have the RAID software, you're better off with one of these, which comes with the necessary RAID software bundled to do RAID5:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-4-RAID5

- About how much performance would I lose in terms of r/w by going with a raid 10 or 5 vs a raid 0? I will be doing automated nightly CCC clones, backups are covered.

With RAID10 speed will drop to about 300MB/sec, RAID5 is about 500MB/sec and RAID0 is 720MB/sec.

- I also have another thunderbolt 2 bay enclosure, if I jam 2 4tb drives in there can I create a raid 10 from pairing that with my Raid 0 new box? Will the performance be impacted on account of the stripes being connected via thunderbolt, if even possible?

You can, but then you'll lose performance because the RAID array will be reduced to the speed of the slowest set of drives, which will be the pair of 4TB drives, so you'll see it drop to about 300MB/sec again.

 

[WinstonRumfoord]

Unless you already have the RAID software, you're better off with one of these, which comes with the necessary RAID software bundled to do RAID5:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-4-RAID5



With RAID10 speed will drop to about 300MB/sec, RAID5 is about 500MB/sec and RAID0 is 720MB/sec.



You can, but then you'll lose performance because the RAID array will be reduced to the speed of the slowest set of drives, which will be the pair of 4TB drives, so you'll see it drop to about 300MB/sec again.

Thanks for the great info!

 

[joema2]

you're better off with one of these, which comes with the necessary RAID software bundled to do RAID5....With RAID10 speed will drop to about 300MB/sec, RAID5 is about 500MB/sec and RAID0 is 720MB/sec....

Generally RAID10 has better overall performance than RAID5 for a 4-drive array with a typical 5:1 read:write ratio. However this varies greatly based on the controller (if h/w based) or the RAID software.

There are many RAID performance calculators on the net, and they often give widely different results based on the exact same input criteria. About all you can be certain of is actual performance tests run with your intended workload on the same hardware/software platform.

We know from lots of testing by various parties (inc'l Mac Performance Guide) that ThunderBay 4 with SoftRAID (which you suggested) has very good performance in RAID0 and RAID5.

In general I don't see the big advantage of RAID10 since both ThunderBay 4 and the competing Promise Pegasus R4 have very good RAID5 performance, and RAID5 is more efficient at disk utilization.